July 08, 2008

Great Research on P2P takedown notices

http://dmca.cs.washington.edu/ is the site for the research into the credibility of some takedown notices for alleged copyright violations enabled by P2P such as BitTorrent.

The alarming, yet sadly unsurprising highlights, from the overview page:

Practically any Internet user can be framed for copyright infringement today. By profiling copyright enforcement in the popular BitTorrent file sharing system, we were able to generate hundreds of real DMCA takedown notices for computers at the University of Washington that never downloaded nor shared any content whatsoever.

Further, we were able to remotely generate complaints for nonsense devices including several printers and a (non-NAT) wireless access point. Our results demonstrate several simple techniques that a malicious user could use to frame arbitrary network endpoints.